 Some of the things that we have tried to do in the economy have gotten more of a following, more of a support. There's less of that great division between the two parties philosophically, not at the leadership level. I think the democratic leadership is still, we're making it evident, they still cling to the old, as I've called it, tax and tax and spend and spend philosophies. And I think there are people out there that, regardless of any affiliation, they want the type of thing we've been talking about, and that is more of a return to a free economy and less government invasion of their lives and their businesses. So whether that could make for a political realignment or whether we're going to see some basic changes in the philosophy of the parties, that too could take place, some people stay with their in their own party, but make their party change and go in a different direction. What can be done by you and by the Republican Party to encourage that process and make it last to the second term if there is a second term? If there is a second term, to continue the new beginning, as I called it, four years ago, and that is our program to continue those things of reducing the intrusiveness of government, reducing the rate of increase in government spending, have tax policies that provide incentive for growth in the economy, and let the people see that as to their surprise they've seen now it worked. Mr. President, could you elaborate a little on what you said about the possibility of the parties moving a little closer together, not their leadership, but the parties themselves? There have been great changes. I've cited this many times in our own conversations around here, having been a Democrat myself. If you look at the philosophy of the Democratic Party in 1932, when I cast my first vote for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Democratic Party was advocating a return to local governments and to state governments, authority that they claimed had been unjustly seized by the federal government. The federal government had been out taking powers that didn't belong to it. They also advocated a cut of 25% in the cost of the federal government. They advocated the elimination of agencies and bureaus and commissions they said were useless. And the Democratic Party then was the party of no protectionism, low tariffs or no tariffs. The Republican Party, on the other hand, was the party of protectionism and high tariffs. It was one of the glaring differences. Today, you have to, if you're honest, say that the only party today that would be happy with those principles of 1932 would be the Republican Party. And by some strange quirk, the Republican Party is no longer the party of protectionism. We are the ones that are opposing protectionism. In other words, there are changes that have occurred in both parties. Now, if today, if out of the economic chaos of a few years ago and with the obvious recovery that we've had and the basis of things contrary to what for 50 years the Democratic Party leadership has been talking about, if the people out there see success, I think that it stands to reason that there's not just going to maybe be a big rush to one party. But I remember in the years before I left the Democratic Party, I was one of a group that thought, well, maybe we can stay in here and change our party. And we couldn't. We gave up and switched. Now, maybe the same thing could be going on today. In the Democratic Party. Yes. That they would be looking and saying whether the must have been the bold weevils certainly were showing a defiance of their party leadership. In 1980, sir, your campaign included several very large bold proposals such as Keproth military overhaul. Your 1984 campaign has rather stayed away from that. You have not talked so much in terms of big new approaches. And we're wondering whether you view the possibility of a second four years as primarily an opportunity to fine tune what you've already accomplished. Or do you think there's a chance for yet more, shall we say, large steps in the direction of your goal? Well, Larry, one of the reasons that sometimes when I hear my opponent saying that we don't come forth with any plan, our plan has been very visible and open since we got here in 1981. And it's like asking a quarterback who's taken the team from his own ten yard line down to about the opposing team's twenty yard line, asking him, is he going to change his game plan at that point? No, he's working. So it seems to me that everything is specific and obvious as to what we will do if we're given a second term here. It'll be a continuation. We haven't got all we asked for. We haven't got all the efficiencies in government. We've got people studying right now. Those 2,480 recommendations of the Grace Committee, many of those have to do with management practices. We don't claim that all of them will turn out to be things that can be done, but we've already implemented about 17% of them that we could do administratively in management practices, many of them in the Defense Department. So that sort of thing, plus the fact that we are looking at a tax reform, is it possible that we can even make the tax system more, provide more incentives? I think that the tax part of our program had to be the main key in the recovery, because in seven previous recessions since World War II, when they tried all the old tricks of flutter with the money supply, the artificial stimulant, get yourself a boom and know that about two or three years later you're going to have another recession. The only time where there was any sustained period of growth was when John F. Kennedy did very much what he did. His tax program wasn't too far removed from ours. As a matter of fact, with all their talk about benefiting one sector of society over another, which ours doesn't, his did to a little extent. He gave more relief at the top and to corporations than we did. Well, certainly tax reform, if it's basic reform, would be a giant step beyond what you or previous presidents have achieved. I guess what I'm getting at is, do you view a second four years as an opportunity for yet major moves, not necessarily change the direction, but moves ahead? Or do you think that the opportunity is, the opportunities don't exist? Well, I'm not in a position to comment now on where we are in our findings on these Grace Commission reports. But we do know that there are many things, Larry, that are still glaring examples of government being hidebound, sticking with its own policies and practices in management. You know, for example, if you only have to look at some of the things we found. For example, we found government agencies that were still paying on cardboard checks. That sounds very silly, cardboard check versus the paper check. You'd be surprised how much greater the overhead in the payroll section was with those cardboard checks. And the advice of people in business that learned long ago, that wasn't the way to go, we're following that practice. We found some practices in government departments where it cost, I think it was $4 a check simply every payday. For every paycheck, it cost $4 for the government to get that out. Well, that's about four times what I understand that it costs in the private sector. And so, whether these are major or whether you could call them actual changes or new things, they're along the same framework that we started. We started out to reduce the size of government that government has taken from the private sector. We started out to provide the incentives tax wise that would create economic growth and reduce unemployment and so forth. We at the same time started out to rebuild our defenses because of the position that we were in and then to actively seek arms reductions and those are still our policies. We're going to keep going at it. A lot of your aides say and of course in your own United Nations speech in September, you made the point very vigorously about your desire for a genuine arms reduction. Do you envision in terms of your own priorities much more time and energy and attention being focused on that and a handful of other foreign concerns? Well, we're going to devote whatever time it takes to bring that about. We do not give into the fact that or the idea that the Soviet Union walked away permanently from those negotiations and I just happen to believe that we cannot go on into another generation here with the world living under the threat of those weapons and knowing that some mad men can push the button someplace and it doesn't even have to be one of the great superpowers of work and probably be triggered by as they proliferate by someone else doing it. Well the only answer to that is to get rid of them and my hope has been and my dream that if we can get the Soviet Union to join us in starting verifiable even reductions of the weapons once you start down that road they've got to see how much better off we'd both be if we got rid of them entirely and then if the two great powers that had all those weapons turned to the rest of the world and said now look we've done it come on even if it's only one or two you've got tucked away somebody let's get rid of them. What you said at the UN and what you just said implies that within the Reagan administration there is now pretty much a consensus on what the US position should be if the Soviets come back to the bargaining table. Is that really true because as you know there have been many accounts of divergence within the administration. You're always going to have in a system like we have with a cabinet where I use a cabinet as a board of directors rather than in the old fashioned way in which one if one cabinet member was speaking and reporting on his particular field everybody else thought they had to stay silent. No. The only difference between this kind of a board of directors that I have here with the cabinet and a regular board of directors is we don't take a vote. When I've heard enough I make the decision. So there are going to be differences and there are going to be legitimate arguments between people because the toughest problems are the ones in which there's some right on both sides. But I don't know where these stories are coming from that I've been reading myself about some great divisions down here on this. No. I think that we're very united on this idea of getting an outright reduction in the weapons. My opponent has been talking about as if I am opposed to all weapons or reduction plans or arms control plans of the past. I haven't seen any in the past in which anyone was really trying to reduce the weapons. And when I came here and found out that under the terms of the SALT II treaty and without it being ratified under the terms of that treaty I was told that the Soviet Union could have added from or had added from the signing. In the time of the signing the equivalent of the nuclear energy that we loosed on Hiroshima they had added that to their arsenal every 11 minutes from the time of that signing. And that isn't to me that is an arms reduction or that isn't doing anything to alleviate the problem that confronts us. But no there's no great dichotomy in here. Everyone is united behind the idea of getting rid of these weapons. Have you Mr. President seen any signs or signals from the Soviets that they are ready to come back or possibly eager to come back to the table to the negotiating table? Have you seen any signals that they really are ready to come back to talk? Well I think the very fact of my meeting with Gromyko, I think what you have to look at is that there hasn't been any outcry on their part that they won't. They have even made some proposals to us. And it's true that when we agreed with one of them they didn't take yes for an answer. We thought we'd said yes. But I'm optimistic and I believe that they themselves are concerned with where this is all going. And particularly I think it sums up in a cartoon some time ago and that was when we started re-arming a cartoon of two Russian generals and one was saying to the other I liked it better when we were the only ones in the arms race. Mr. President, a few moments ago you used the phrase out there in referring to the country. You spent some weeks out there with the people now rather intimately. Could you tell us what you saw out there that perhaps surprised you in its intensity or in its direction? Yes. I have been emotionally moved by what I've seen out there in first of all the very spirit and optimism and feeling of the country, the pride that you see now. It wasn't too many years ago. I remember I served a term as governor when the campuses were burning down the ROTC buildings and so forth. But even the adults were happy about our country. There is a patriotism that is just reborn. There's that. There is a confidence, a pride in country that is so evident. And on some of the so-called issues that I can only tell you that the response in remarks that I make, the response to such things as our rebuilding, as Grenada, is usually met with an ovation and sometimes a standing ovation. And this is all indicative of that. And then the other thing of course is they're feeling about the economy that we're back, that they can't hope again and they can have ambition about where we're going. And I wasn't quite prepared for it. I'd find it with some of the mail, but then I can't read the 500,000 letters we get every month. But some of the samples that I see, but it still, it didn't have the impact that you see out there with the, well look at what the flag companies say, that their sales are up. They're more people buying flags than they've ever bought them before. I think it began for me in a way that opening night ceremonies of the Olympics to see the people there and to look down at those thousands of volunteers putting on that magnificent show. And they weren't professionals. They had a professional producer, a darn good producer. But these were volunteers. These weren't show people. And they revealed that they, I don't know how many hours they must have put in. They were doing rather professional dancing in some of these routines and so forth, but literally thousands of them. And from there it's just snowballed. Mr. President, a quite prominent Republican leader speaking off the record the other night said that in his opinion for the Republican party to hold what he thinks will be a great victory in this election, to hold on to that, that the party will have to be seen as more compassionate, stand for less selfishness than some people assume or believe it now does. Does that make political sense to you, Mr. President? Well, the only thing that's wrong there is he's gone for an image that somehow seems to have been created out there for political purposes. We have been compassionate. All of these stories about throwing the people out into the snow or throwing them off the school lunch programs, they're just plain lies. We're spending more money on food by 37% than our predecessors were. What we have done and some of the changes we've made is we found that some of the programs were not able to do all they should for the truly needy because they were so busy also helping some people that really should not be getting help from their neighbors. They have an income level above that. So what we did was redirect. For example, there are three and a half million more people getting food stamps than we're getting them in 1980. But we got rid of 850,000 people that were getting them. And because we didn't feel their income wanted, when people are getting almost double the poverty level and getting in their earnings and getting benefits on top of that, we've aimed really at people from 130% of the poverty level down. There are more kids now getting the free lunch. The free lunch, but there has been a slight reduction in the subsidy of the school lunch for people, children of families of upper incomes. They were getting a subsidized lunch, the government paying part of it. Okay, we're still paying part of it. We're not paying as much. So their own personal price went up. I think it's something like three cents of lunch, something of this kind. But the elderly, the people on social security, the average married couple is getting $180 a month more than they were getting when we took office. One of the things I think that contributed to this was the program of the social security disabled. Now, we came in here and the general accounting office before we got here had submitted to the Congress findings that anywhere from 20% to 40% of the disability social security recipients were actually ineligible, that there was corruption or just sloppiness going on. The Congress had ordered an action to meet this report. Well, we came into office and found out that we were bound by a congressional act that we had to go to work on this. Now, I'm not going to cheer for how the bureaucracy went at it over in social security, but they started and yet they were directed to do this. They started simply whacking the people off and there was very little recourse the people had who were cut. They couldn't appeal and in the meantime, if they did appeal, they still weren't getting this. Well, as we began to see how many people were caught up in this that undeserving and should have still been getting their disability payments, we managed to make some changes then and we issued the orders that they had couldn't do this. Some of these people were entitled to an examination to find out if they should be thrown off the program or not and ordered them that by golly they kept them on payments until it was actually determined. They wouldn't be cut off the payments just on the accusation and then have to live without those payments until there was a hearing and an examination. But yes, that was badly handled and I'm kind of alert to that sort of thing because I remember as governor, I remember some programs out there, I issued an order and then at the state level I saw the bureaucracy. Simply move in and enforce the order in such a way that I called on the same day I found out about it. I called a press conference and went before a press conference as governor and said I am rescinding the order because I have found there is no way that I can protect the people that are being discriminated against unfairly. Mr. President, quite a number of studies have shown that so far the very poor and this includes many blacks have not benefited much from the economic recovery and I realize that there are other studies that show some other things but as the electorate has broken down during this campaign and every poll including your own Republican polls show this, there is quite a split along white black lines and poor versus affluent lines. Are you concerned about this, the fact that a large majority of blacks and an overwhelming majority of the poor are for your opponent and feel that your administration has not done them any good? I know they feel that way but I also know that there are some pretty knowledgeable blacks who don't and who know the true story and this whole thing, they have had this preached to them by a number of leaders and sometimes I suspect that there are leaders of pressure groups and interest groups out here in the country who are very concerned about keeping their very cushy jobs and they can keep those jobs better if they can keep their constituents unhappy and believing that there is a cause. But again, of the six million new jobs that have in these last 21 months, a million of those have gone to blacks. I can't see where, well let me give you something else where there could be a misunderstanding. This couples in with the thing that our tax program is supposed to be more beneficial to people at the upper levels than to the bottom. What it has not in a percentage basis is even Stephen but one thing that most people don't realize is that our tax program really hardly broke even with, I don't know that it did, with easing the tax burden that had been passed by our predecessors in 1977, the Social Security payroll tax. Now that tax not only increased in rate and has a couple of increases still to go but it increased vastly in the amount of earning subject to the tax. Right now it's up around $38,000 is subject to the tax. So what that means is everybody from $38,000 down is paying a payroll tax of around 7% on every dollar of their earnings. Now somebody that's making $75,000 they're only paying that tax on half their earnings. So of course somebody down here says to me, you know, where is that tax cut for me? Their income tax wasn't that big but that a payroll tax that's on 100% of their earnings, this is why I would, I think I could guarantee you that more than half the working people in this country, their Social Security payroll tax is bigger than their income tax. Now those people first of all they pay that Social Security tax isn't deductible from their income tax. So they're paying an income tax on the very money that they're also paying the other tax on. And I think that this is a distortion that has made many of them. But let me, Larry, I'm wired in here, bring me that little jet magazine here that's on the desk. Now I think it's isn't it, oh did somebody cover it up with something? Oh come on, gosh darn it. Ruffle through that, we're looking at drawer there, the middle drawer there. Well I know I'm taking up too much time here but let me just, this is a jet magazine and eight black citizens themselves put up $8,000 to buy an ad in that magazine. And the ad gives the comparative figures on all of these things about various help, whether it's for going to school, food, things of this kind compared, our 83 figures compared with the Carter figures. And we are spending more, considerably more in every area than they are spending or than they were spending. Mr. President, you've been under some pretty brisk attack by your opponent now for a while. Was there any point where you thought to yourself, you know, he's got a point there that kind of surprised you that you tucked in the back of your mind and said maybe we ought to do something about that someday. No, because I found most of his were based on pure demagoguery and this type of thing that we're talking about right here of this misinformation that has been so widespread. And I have to say we don't seem to be able to get our story as widespread as theirs. And Dave, did somebody stack the stuff up there or anything, that jet magazine that was there? Oh, all right. All right. Well, we seem to have a slight misunderstanding over the time allowed with just a couple of things that are really crucial. Let me just try to round them off. When you were nominated in 1980 that ended a long split within the party, ideological split within your own party and your political success since then has kept that down. But at the Dallas convention we began to see a revival of that as many other people looked ahead. How do you see that? How do you feel about that as you look ahead? Is it going to be possible to keep the party really together philosophically or as you get into a lame duck situation are we going to see a revival? But I think there is a fringe that, yes, that is down the liberal side and you can usually look at their voting record and find out that they don't very often support us, but there is also a fringe up at the other side. And that fringe, I have to know as a fact, as far back as 1976, tried to solicit some of us and wanted to get a third party started. So I don't think they are supporters who abandoned us. They were never with us. Mr. President, could you give us one sentence on your new supporters, the young. Do you expect to see that continue to grow? Oh, I hope so. I have to tell you that has been one of the most thrilling things and particularly from someone like myself with my background of being hung in effigy a few times back in the Governor's days. It's just amazing and every place in the country. I haven't seen any let up. It's the same every place. And the funny thing is they are kind of practical about it. Oh, there is a patriotism. There is no question about that. But I asked a young lady that I sat down beside her to kind of a picnic lunch out on one of these campaign things after having done a rally and seen all of this. And she was telling me that she was working with a group that they were doing voter registration. And I said, well, tell me. I said, what is, what has brought all of you, your generation to this point? And she laid it right out hard and fast economics. She said, we, we know what she said next year I'm going to be looking for a job. And she said, we see that now there's something happening in which there's a future out there for us. And she said, we, we, earlier people were telling us there wasn't any and it didn't, didn't look too good for us. But she said, now we like what we see. To finish up, Mr. President, how does it feel to be running any of what's really your last campaign for public office? Well, there can't help but be some relief in that because it's a, it's a hard road. And I only had one previous experience of doing it as an incumbent where you've got the job to do as well as campaign. And I have to tell you, being the challenger is a lot easier. A little regret along with the relief too? No. Maybe if I were a younger man, but no, I think that I've had my day and it's not over yet. But when it is, I think that will be it. Thank you, sir. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. He thought it was not a mistake. Very nice. Thank you personally. Thank you guys for all the best. One more time to San Diego. That's a good start. Thank you.